Hello and welcome to Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies. The focus of this learning path is to prepare you for Microsoft’s AZ-300 exam, but even if you’re not going to take the exam, this learning path will help you get started on your way to becoming an Azure architect.

My name’s Guy Hummel. I’m the Azure Content Lead at Cloud Academy.

The AZ-300 exam tests your knowledge of five subject areas and that’s how we’ve structured this learning path as well.

We’ll start with Deploying and Configuring Azure Infrastructure. This is the biggest section, and it covers a wide variety of topics, including storage, virtual machines, networking, and Azure Active Directory. You have to know these topics in great depth for the exam. For example, in addition to knowing how to create a virtual machine, you also need to know how to make it highly available, and how to automate VM deployment using Azure Resource Manager. In the network area, you need to know how to connect virtual networks together using VNET peering and virtual network gateways. In the Azure Active Directory area, you need to know how to synchronize Azure AD with an on-premises Active Directory server and also enable single sign-on.

The next section is on implementing workloads and security. You’ll learn how to connect your on-premises network to an Azure virtual network and how to migrate your on-premises servers to Azure using Site Recovery. Once you have applications in Azure, you’ll usually want to implement load balancing, which helps improve both performance and availability. In the security area, you’ll learn how to make it harder for hackers to get in by using multi-factor authentication, and you’ll also learn how to limit each user’s access level to only as much as they need by using role-based access control.

The third section is one of the shortest. You’ll learn how to create and deploy apps using either Azure App Service or Azure Container Service.

The next section starts with how to implement authentication using a variety of different methods. One especially important concept is Managed Identity (which used to be called Managed Service Identity). This makes it easy to authenticate an application so it can access other services. After that, you’ll find out how to encrypt your data. One of the most important concepts in this topic is how to use Azure Key Vault, which is where you can store your cryptographic keys.

Finally, we’ll cover how to develop for the cloud. One of the greatest features of the cloud is autoscaling. Instead of having to provision enough compute power to handle peaks, you can just tell Azure to add and remove compute resources based on the demand. You have to be careful how you configure autoscaling, though, because if you don’t set up the rules correctly, it could have a big impact on your application’s performance and cost.

Another great feature of Azure is how easy it is to set up messaging between your applications. Azure has messaging services for every need, including Event Grid, Service Bus, Relay Service, Event Hub, and Notification Hub. In this section, you’ll learn about all of them.

That’s a lot of great topics to learn, so let’s get started!